Around this time last year, I showed you how to embed tweets in WordPress using the Twitter API.
Today, I want to improve on that script by adding a backup to it. Twitter is often down or unresponsive, and when it is, the previous script fails and displays nothing.
With a backup, we store an extra copy of each set of tweets that we find. When Twitter is down, we can then use this backup to display tweets as normal.
As 2012 begins, I want to look back over the past year to see what can be learnt from it. Learning from your mistakes is less glamorous than a list of grand New Year’s Resolutions (Though I do like those too), but often more effective at ensuring the next year is even better than the last.
With that in mind, what follows are some of the lessons I have picked out from my own 2011. I would love to hear if these resonate with you.
Recently, one of our clients needed to let visitors create WordPress posts (Or custom post types of course) from the website itself.
In this post, I’m going to walk through some of the WordPress functions I used to achieve this. We’ll go over creating the post itself, adding categories/tags, and adding metadata.
This is one of the most common questions I get asked; how do you make a floating box with share links?
Today, we’re going to see just how simple it can be. We will:
Update (1 Feb 2013): I’ve updated the script here, primarily to jump to the latest version of the bassistance plugin.
This article will teach you how to add validation to your WordPress comment forms, using jQuery.
With validation, users can submit their comment and instantly see if they’ve hit an issue. There is no need to submit the page and get WordPress’ default “There is a problem…” page. Instead, errors are displayed inline instantly.
In our example, we will build a plugin which you can drop into any theme and will work instantly.
Today, we’re going to replace the standard “Older Posts” links on your blog. Our plugin will create a button to instantly load the next page of posts, without reloading the page (Similar to what Twitter used to do at the bottom of profiles)
Update (1 March 2018): Demo site taken down. Screenshot above shows how the button looks, posts then load seamlessly in place, as though there had always been 20 posts on the page rather than just 10.
You can also download the completed files as a plugin here (Just upload and activate it).
Here’s something we’ve been working on for a while now; an all new design! If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, please click through and check it out!
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Nicer than the old version?
17th March 2011
15th June 2011
11th April 2011
21st January 2013